>>Also they've been giving out these warnings for months.
That's not true though. They've been telling him that his account is in read-only state. Literally no mention anywhere is made about deletion of the account or data in it, until that very last email which gives him 7 days to move his data(which is unreasonable).
If they said 6 months ago "your account is entering a read only state, if you don't go below your quota it will get deleted in 180 days" I'd consider this entire post to be a waste of space - but that's not what happened, and I'm very sympathetic to his situation.
There are dated messages in the article showing this going back to at least July 2023. So yes, your second case is closer to what appears to have been the sequence of events.
The deleted part doesn't come up until you have seven days.
otherwise it says, verbatim:
Hello,
Your account was previously placed in a 14 day grace period because you exceeded your pooled storage limit.
The pooled storage grace period expired on May 25, 2023 and your account is now in a “read-only” state. In this state services are impacted, including users not being able to upload new files or create new Google Docs, Sheets, Slides or Forms. Learn more about the features that are currently impacted.
To prevent any further disruption to services, you can free up or get more storage.
Sincerely,
The Google Workspace Team
If you just read that there is nothing mentioning it will ever be deleted.
That's not true though. They've been telling him that his account is in read-only state. Literally no mention anywhere is made about deletion of the account or data in it, until that very last email which gives him 7 days to move his data(which is unreasonable).
If they said 6 months ago "your account is entering a read only state, if you don't go below your quota it will get deleted in 180 days" I'd consider this entire post to be a waste of space - but that's not what happened, and I'm very sympathetic to his situation.